Examples of known oxetane-ring-containing (meth)acrylic ester compounds include 3-methyl-3-(2-methacryloyloxyethyloxymethyl)oxetane and 3-ethyl-3-(2-acryloyloxyethyloxymethyl)oxetane (see, for example, Patent Literature (PTL) 1 and Non Patent Literature (NPL) 1).
An oxetane-ring-containing (meth)acrylic ester compound may be synthetically prepared by synthesizing a corresponding oxetane-ring-containing alcohol as a precursor, and allowing the prepared oxetane-ring-containing alcohol to react with (meth)acrylic acid. As a process for synthetically preparing such a precursor oxetane-ring-containing alcohol, there is known a process for preparing an oxetane-ring-containing alcohol by allowing 3-ethyl-3-hydroxymethyloxetane to react with a haloalcohol whose hydroxyl group being protected by a protecting group; and subsequently performing deprotection (NPL 1). This process, however, suffers from problems such that the process requires the step of protecting a reactive group and the step of deprotecting the protected reactive group, thereby includes complicated multiple reaction steps, and suffers from a low yield. As a process including not-so-complicated reaction step(s), there is known a process for preparing an oxetane-ring-containing alcohol by allowing 3-ethyl-3-methanesulfonyloxymethyloxetane and a diol to react with each other in the presence of a phase transfer catalyst in a liquid-liquid biphasic system (PTL 2). This process, however, suffers from problems such that a target product is obtained in a low yield because of low reaction selectivity.
Under present circumstances, only few types of oxetane-ring-containing (meth)acrylic ester compounds are known, because it is difficult to efficiently synthetically prepare precursor corresponding oxetane-ring-containing alcohols, as is described above.